Kindle the Spark

Happy Imbolc!

The children have been noticing the very early signs of spring: daffodils, snowdrops and buds on the trees.

🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿

We also enjoyed making this sourdough spelt foccacia bread this morning which will be followed by a house clean to get ready for spring!

Today we are doing the big bird watch!

We are ready with binoculars, identifying books and paper and pencils for some drawing.

🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦🐦

We also love these bird crafts and games: https://darcymillerdesigns.com/from-the-studio/camp-darcy-bird-crafts-and-games/

🎨 Lore Pemberton

We explored ancient Egypt today with the mummification of tomatos, boat making, an Egypt inspired lunch, hieroglyphs and the making a clay mummies or game!

Today I witnessed my little one chatting to this little robin for at least a few minutes. What a sweet little interaction!

I love how slowing down, the simple things, can give us so much to learn and connect with!

❄️🐦☀️❄️🐦☀️❄️🐦☀️❄️🐦☀️

PREVIEW JAPAN UNIT
Tales & Trails Asia curriculum

These are a few pages from the educator guide and appendix from the Japan unit.

Each unit starts with a story which leads to numeracy, literacy, science, nature studies, arts, movement, humanities, foreign languages, music, mindfullness, poetry etc.

Our own children love to start each unit making a vehicle out of cardboard boxes to travel with their 'passports' to their new country and story!

The Asia curriculum consists of 8 units covering: Tibet, Bangladesh, China, Korea, India, Japan and Myanmar.

Now £30.00! Www.kindlethespark.co.uk

Pruning the fruit trees is one of my favorite jobs in our little orchard!

January is a good month to do this, when the trees are still at rest.

We love to collect some of the most beautiful branches and put them in vases around the house. It's just so wonderful to see them blossom inside in a few weeks!

Www.kindlethespark.co.uk

Another beautiful book we love reading.... :

'You are Stardust'.

🎨 (Lore Pemberton)

Where we live, we rarely have snow.

What we do like to do, is making an ice rink in our back garden!

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

Another lovely winter story is this book of 'Winter Sleep'...

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

🎨 Lore Pemberton

A nature history walk today for us, to a local iron age hillfort!

💚❄️🗡️💚❄️🗡️💚❄️🗡️💚❄️🗡️

This book is a lovely classic!

'The Mitten', by Jan Brett

The weather has turned cold where we live.

A good day for a nature walk and baking a sourdough spelt loaf!

https://heartbeetkitchen.com/spelt-sourdough-bread/

(🎨 Lore Pemberton)

The weather has turned cold where we live.

A good day for a nature walk and baking a sourdough spelt loaf!

https://heartbeetkitchen.com/spelt-sourdough-bread/

(🎨 Lore Pemberton)

Simple Spelt Sourdough Bread • Heartbeet Kitchen Made with nutritious spelt flour, this sourdough bread has the most delicious nutty flavor and soft, chewy crumb. Crisp, golden brown crust!

We made this pretty Moon Calender today!

We wish you a Sparkling New Year!

We are diving back into our Tales & Trails Asia curriculum, unit 7, this week.

This unit contains a Japanese story about the Moon Maiden.

For our Japan study we decided to make a zen garden in an old tank, kindfully donated by a friend.

It has been such a wonderful project to start the year with a beautiful zen garden in our front room!

For more information about the Tales & Trails curriculum, see Www.kindlethespark.co.uk

Thank you for all the wonderfull support this year!

We are excited for our new Kindle the Spark projects ahead and in progress!

We wish you all wonderfull winter celebrations and some lovely cosy days with friends and family!

We have landed in a little cottage for a little holiday in the countryside.

On Christmas Eve we often paint a canvas (often a self-portrait), so we will be doing that again! And we will spend the days knitting, playing board games and going for walks between the wintery showers.

We wish you some cosy days too!

🎨 Tijana Lukovic

We have been busy make popcorn garlands and bird feeders today for the winter solstice tomorrow.

We will read the book 'Night Tree' in which a family goes to the woodlands at night to decorate a tree for the wildlife. (This is actually a Christmas Story but we change it in our home to 'Winter Solstice'.)

We will be heading outside as well, tomorrow when it is just dark and decorate one of our trees in the garden, followed by a spiral candle walk, a campfire and hot chocolate.

🔥🔥🔥🌲🌲🌲🔥🔥🔥

Tonight we are wrapped up on the sofa with quilts, candles, hot chocolate and tea for a zoom storytelling event!

Its one of our little solstice tradition😊

(children join in till 8.30pm, adults until 10pm 😊)

Today we had fun cutting snowflakes!

We used these instructions and some of these templates:
https://www.itsalwaysautumn.com/cut-snowflake-video-tutorial-free-templates.html

I drew the template for my 7 year old on her folded paper. It is tricky to clip through thick paper. So the bigger the paper, the easier it is to cut!

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

We love spending time with our little ones, but women gathering together on a winters evening, - by a fire in a barn in the countryside-, is magical and nurturing too!

On our home ed mothers gathering evening, we made this chocolate-pastry tree which was beautiful and delicious! Hmmmmm...

https://cafedelites.com/churro-nutella-christmas-tree/

We did lots of campfire cooking this week to celebrate the festives coming! What about bananas filled with chocolate? Apples stuffed with cinnamon and raisins? Or spelt pancakes? mmmm..

The children made lots of dens and birdfeeders out of pinecones as well.

What a lovely week in the woods!

Today we explored St Lucia's day, celebrated in some Scandanavian countries. This lady in white with a candle crown, represents the light.

We made St. Lucia's buns, made with saffron and shaped in spirals. They were tasty too!

Instead of making a candle wreath crown, we tried out a crochet-machine and made our own head bands for the winter weather! 😁

Our story-quilt is done! 😍

We really enjoyed exploring the chapter book: 'Where the Mountain Meets the Moon'.

The book is full adventures and Chinese folklore...

For every tale within the book the children made a story panel from fabrics (clipping and glueing). This week we finished putting it all together into a story quilt to be hung up in our barn! 😍

Salt dough Christmas Ornaments: an activity we enjoy every year and a great activity for children of multiple ages!

Salt dough recipe: https://thelistedhome.co.uk/how-to-make-salt-dough-with-just-three-ingredients/.

We used out-of-date wholemeal flour.

We made some new candles by melting old candle wax in different colours. These will be nice christmas presents for family and friends.

We used our hand made wicks, see instructions here: https://www.sewhistorically.com/how-to-make-diy-candle-wicks-with-cotton-string/

Winter books...

🎨 Lore Pemberton

🎨 Lore Pemberton

The children are enjoying their new fire lighters for the campfires!

🔥😊🔥😊🔥😊🔥😊

The extra long hand-made snake & dragon handles from oak, work so well for little hands! (5 and 7 year olds) As well as the extra long and thick firesteel fire starters!